Hi guys, hope all is well. I have been away from the forum for a bit as i have been busy with my S1 Elite, however I am now the proud owner of this lovely yellow Eclat. She is a 1979 with only 69k on the clock, 2 owners from new and is totally original. She just needs a good cut and polish and new headlining to bring to perfect condition. Stuck a pic for you to see. Talk soon. Eliteman.

looks great Liam.

One thing that made a huge difference to the appearance on my old 521 was whipping the front and rear bumpers off, flattening them with wet and dry and some filler where needed, then giving them a spray with satin black paint from Halford's. I used rattle cans and it looked great. I also did the sill covers, the roll hoop cover and the door frames. It didn't take long.

NB it's a great idea to take the sill covers off to spray them, as you can replace the front seatbelt mounts while they are off. The MOT tester can't see the seatbelt mounts without removing the covers which are riveted on, so even if they are horrible and unsafe, the cars get a pass year after year as nobody can see them. The seatbelt on my 521 came away with a sharp tug as the bolt had rusted through. It had passed its MOT 3 months earlier. With the cover off, I didn't remove the mount plate - I swept it up! Both sides were awful.

Worth checking as its not the sort of thing to take chances with.

Looks great. Is that your third four seater now ? Good on you!

Great looking car, if mine was like that I wouldn't have messed about.

Hi Dunc,

That's a good point about the seatbelt plates - how difficult was it to get the sills off and back on again?

Cheers, Mat.

its pretty easy, just use a drill of the right size on the end of the pop rivets, then use a wide feather splitter style chisel to tap with a hammer to seperate it from the body and split the sill cover adhesive. You'll get lots of nasty creaking and cracking noises from the fibreglass sill cover as your doing this, which is a bit alarming, but I just shored mine up when it was off by applying P40 glassfibre repair along the inside of the seams. You'll need a pop riveter to refit the covers, but its not a difficult job.